Instructional Design, eLearning Development, Learning Experience Design
Food Safety
Scenario-based eLearning
Analysis
Food poisoning is very common. In fact, we all know someone who has had food poisoning, and perhaps at one point we have even had it ourselves. The US has rigorous food safety standards and quality control measures in place. Yet despite this, food-borne illness is becoming increasingly frequent and therefore a more widespread problem in the United States.
According to the CDC, about 48 million people get sick and 128,000 are hospitalized for food poisoning each year. Here is the problem: Hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers are being flooded with patients who have food poisoning, and this is using up critical bed space for other emergent and urgent patients. Food poisoning is an occurrence that can be avoided with proper food handling techniques. According to the CDC, the most common pathogens seen in hospital admissions are Salmonella, Clostridium, Perfringens, Campylobacter, and E. coli 0157. These pathogens are commonly found in contaminated and/or undercooked meats.
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To further assess this challenge and to assess training needs, I spoke to the following SMEs: A practitioner at a local hospital and a director of food safety and quality control. Both of these experts gave me feedback and information that strongly suggests that a majority of food cases could potentially be avoided if people were more careful and more informed about food safety- and specifically the handling of meat.
Challenge
Reduce the number of hospital and urgent care admissions for food poisoning, thereby reducing the number of beds occupied, freeing capacity, and allowing for other critical and emergent admissions.
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Objective
By the end of this training, participants will increase their knowledge base on food safety- specifically on how it relates to handling and cooking meat with the goal of reducing the incidence of food poisoning.
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Tools
Articulate Storyline
WellSaid Labs
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Highlights
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13 slides
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Scenario-based learning
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Includes narration
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Focusing on cooking meat to the correct temperature, thawing meat correctly, avoiding cross-contamination
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One of the issues that needs to be addressed is that there may be a lack of knowledge on how to properly handle and cook meat. So, this lack of knowledge may be leading to widespread food poisoning occurrences. These gaps in knowledge must be filled in and then people can begin to modify their food safety handling behavior. Specifically, people need to be trained in understanding what temperature to cook which meat, proper protocols for thawing meats, and proper procedures to avoid cross-contaminating other foods with raw meat. The increase in knowledge will lead to a modification in behavior which lead to a decrease in food poisoning and consequently a decrease in hospital and urgent care admissions.
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Design development
I designed and developed this course from start to finish. To accomplish this, I created an action map, and a storyboard, developed a prototype, and then the final product.
The learners for this training are adults who cook and/or handle raw meat. Since this is such a large group of people, this training should be short and have the ability to be easily disseminated to a large amount of people. Some possibilities for this are social media, hospital and urgent care waiting rooms, and YouTube videos. This training is designed so that it can be completed on iPads and cell phones. A focus group needs to be established to help measure implementation evaluation. This group should be surveyed pre and post-training.
Cell phone view
Action Map
The learning objectives for this course are as follows:
By the end of this training, participants will increase their knowledge base on food safety specifically on how it relates to handling meat with the goal of food safety to reduce the incidence of food poisoning. This is a scenario-based e-learning training. The training will include 3 short scenarios so that the learner can be engaged and learn by doing. This training should last about 7 to 10 minutes although learners will have the chance to repeat the training.
The course will be designed in Articulate Storyline. The scenarios will be focused on filling knowledge gaps in understanding what temperature to cook which meat, proper protocols for thawing meats, and proper procedures to avoid cross-contaminating other foods with raw meat.
60 days after training, a brief survey should be sent to the focus group rating their knowledge of the specific scenarios they learned through training.
2 months after training, an analysis of a target hospital needs to be conducted to see if their overall admissions for food poisoning have decreased.
4 months after training, an analysis of a target hospital needs to be conducted to see if their overall admissions for food poisoning have decreased.